"It's not just that," Harry said after some hesitation. "I mean, it's not just her... being here, now. I've been thinking about this for a while." He sighed.
"The thing is... I never really thought of the way they treated me as wrong, exactly. I knew it wasn't like... well, like your family. I knew it wasn't fun. I hated it, but then it was over, and... the war, and everything. I moved in with Ron and just forgot about my relatives, didn't think about them. What was the point, right? But then..." his face softened a little. "James was born. And I held him for the first time, and I looked at him, and I swear, I have never loved anything half so much."
He let out a deep shuddering breath. "And we took him home, and we'd got the nursery all ready, we'd spent bloody weeks picking the right paint colour, and you'd got this Quidditch mobile thing hanging, and there was this huge pile of presents all your brothers - well, sisters-in-law, had sent..." he swallowed, and his head sunk a little over the tabletop.
"I looked at it, and I thought - I wish I remembered having a room like this while I was growing up. And then I thought about it some more, and I realised - I would never, ever let anyone treat my baby the way my Aunt and Uncle treated me, even for a day - even for a minute. It was wrong, what they did. Bloody wrong, and no one did anything, no one said anything, I was a little kid and I was all alone in that place for ten years and I didn't deserve it."
There were tears in his eyes, but he would not let them fall. He had spent those ten years learning, among so many other things, not to cry.